All posts tagged ‘Equation’

Image by flickr user floodllama, used under creative commons licensing

Last week while baking muffins with my son’s preschool class, I set fire to the school. Okay, technically I didn’t set it on fire — it was only butter smoke from the tin that set off the alarm, necessitating the entire school of a couple hundred kids filing out to the basketball courts while the fire department arrived en mass.

Anyway, after the holiday break my wife will be back for Wednesday cooking and I don’t imagine it’ll be NEARLY so exciting. Besides, Leif was line leader that day, and he was really, very proud to lead the class evacuation. (I stood there with my large metal bowl and wooden spoon, smelling of smoke and trying to look innocuous.)

All this is to say that the stakes might be just a little bit higher for T-Day this year — the one bonafide holiday per year that I’m officially in charge of the kitchen. What should I cook? Should I be forced to register with some government agency before attempting to cook? These questions come down to commitment. Simply, can I get away with canned sauce and Stove Top, or this year do I need to explore dishes that don’t come pre-packaged at Trader Joe’s?

I can’t mess this up. And when I can’t mess something up that means that rather than relying on my sometimes questionable common sense it’s time for…MATH!

Here’s an equation calculating with absolute mathematical certainty (wink, wink) the effort in hours that you and/or yours need to slave in order to ensure T-Day success.

.

.

• E= What expectations have you set with your everyday meals? Enter 1-10 with 1 being “ramen is beyond us” and 10 being “I am the next Iron Chef”

• KPSYCH= The number of handprint turkeys, thankfulness cards, acorn sculptures, or other kid-created seasonal crafts that hang, sit, or lurk around the house

This runs from almost exactly 24 hours for a gathering of 20 people with high expectations all around, to a minimum of half-an-hour for a family of two with take-out as the norm. However, Thanksgiving is frequently crowdsourced, so please feel free to subtract from a potentially terrifying total the hours that others will likely spend preparing dishes to bring to your T-Day potluck. You may also be able to subtract hours if before dinner you ply your guests with wine—I suggest that good wine in quantity is worth subtracting at the rate of $D/15 with $ being cost of the bottle and D being the average number of drinks consumed by non-pregnant adult guests.

This week’s puzzle asked you to use a simple algorithm to split your holiday gift budget across a prioritized list of friends and family (and enemies who, nonetheless, you have to buy for). Here’s the method:

• First write down your TOTAL holiday gift-buying budget.
• Now list all the people you have to buy gifts for.
• Rank the importance of each of these people: write a number 1-10 with 10 being important in front of each person’s name.
• Now add all these ranks: if you have people ranked 10, 6, 5, 3, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 1, your total would be 39.
• Set up an equation with this total (times a variable) equal to your budget—for me: 39x=$500
• Solve: x=$12.82
• Multiply x back into your priorities list: on someone ranked “10″ you spend 10x or $128.20. On someone ranked 6 you spend 6x or $76.92.

I hate to admit that I actually do this. In fact, when I first put this online, a friend who runs the Cornell Outdoor Education program emailed to say he uses a similar method to split the year’s budget across programs. You could also use something like it to prioritize and split free time across a weekend or, really, anything in which you gotta divide a pool of resources across a number of “things” or “tasks.” (I’d love to hear other uses!)

Many of you used this formula wrapped in an algorithm wrapped in an enigma to split your cash this holiday season, and the winner of the $50 ThinkGeek gift certificate — randomly selected from this week’s entrants — is Lynn, who ranked her bosses and coworkers lower than her cats and plans to use her new-found riches to buy geek cookie cutters. A worthy cause, indeed!

Cheers to all who entered and especially to Lynn who is a winner. While the rest of you, technically, are losers, you can still use the code GEEKDAD33NG to get $10 off a $50 order at ThinkGeek.

Come back Monday for Dave G., who will very likely actually write a puzzle as opposed to writing something he thinks is neat and then pretending it’s a puzzle…

If you’re reading this now, you’re likely desperate. Dude, don’t worry. Take a deep breath. It’s going to be all right. Okay, now go to the nearest ATM machine and take out the amount that is exactly your holiday gift-buying budget. Return your wallet (minus driver’s license) to a secure location in your home, and get ye to the nearest shopping center, cash in hand.

But first, in order to assure that said cash is, in fact, all you need, it’s worth doing the math. Use the procedure below to split your budget logically across your gift list. (I did this for the Science Channel last year, so you can just watch the vid if you prefer.)

Image by flickr user floodllama, used under creative commons licensing

Last week while baking muffins with my son’s preschool class, I set fire to the school. Okay, technically I didn’t set it on fire—it was only butter smoke from the tin that set off the alarm, necessitating the entire school of a couple hundred kids filing out to the basketball courts while the fire department arrived en mass.

Anyway, after the holiday break my wife will be back for Wednesday cooking and I don’t imagine it’ll be NEARLY so exciting. Besides, Leif was line leader that day, and he was really, very proud to lead the class evacuation. (I stood there with my large metal bowl and wooden spoon, smelling of smoke and trying to look innocuous.)

All this is to say that the stakes might be just a little bit higher for T-Day this year—the one bonafide holiday per year that I’m officially in charge of the kitchen. What should I cook? Should I be forced to register with some government agency before attempting to cook? These questions come down to commitment. Simply, can I get away with canned sauce and Stove Top, or this year do I need to explore dishes that don’t come pre-packaged at Trader Joe’s?

I can’t mess this up. And when I can’t mess something up that means that rather than relying on my sometimes questionable common sense it’s time for…MATH!

Here’s an equation calculating with absolute mathematical certainty (wink, wink) the effort in hours that you and/or yours need to slave in order to ensure T-Day success.

.

.

• E= What expectations have you set with your everyday meals? Enter 1-10 with 1 being “ramen is beyond us” and 10 being “I am the next Iron Chef”

• KPSYCH= The number of handprint turkeys, thankfulness cards, acorn sculptures, or other kid-created seasonal crafts that hang, sit, or lurk around the house

This runs from almost exactly 24 hours for a gathering of 20 people with high expectations all around, to a minimum of half-an-hour for a family of two with take-out as the norm. However, Thanksgiving is frequently crowdsourced, so please feel free to subtract from a potentially terrifying total the hours that others will likely spend preparing dishes to bring to your T-Day potluck. You may also be able to subtract hours if before dinner you ply your guests with wine—I suggest that good wine in quantity is worth subtracting at the rate of $D/15 with $ being cost of the bottle and D being the average number of drinks consumed by non-pregnant adult guests.

Equations relating speed and mass go back to Newton and beyond. But after I got geeky with an equation for Halloween candy, Geek Dads Jonathan Liu and John Booth hit me with an intriguing question: what about relating speed and MESS? Simply, how fast should you expect a clean kids’ room to get messy?

Said GD’s did the better part of the brainstorming and I did the factor slapping, to produce the collaborative equation below. Plug in your family’s numbers to discover how many square feet per hour your kid’s room will accumulate non-traversable junk. For the über geeks out there, keep reading below the equation for more mathematical sweetness you can do with the Speed of Mess.

Here, for your practical use and cerebral edification is the mathematically certain (wink, wink) Speed of Mess:

.

.

• K#= The number of kids playing in the room

• KA= The average age of K#

• KB1= Is one of K# a boy between ages 6 and 13? Enter 1 for yes and 0 for no.

• KB2= Enter age of boy between 6 and 13. These are the planet’s messiest beasts.

• F= Fodder: Generally, how much junk (toys, clothes, books, reptiles, etc.) does your child’s room contain? 1-10 with 10 being Lloyd from the show Hoarders

• S= Storage: 1-10 with 10 being wire bins to the ceilings and ample closet space and 1 being bare, padded room (though let me also point out the usefulness of the latter)

• C= Percentage of occupied time in which K are using a computer, TV, game console or other screen-based entertainment

SOM is the square feet per hour that your kids’ room will collect mess that precludes passage. Max for three, 10-year-old boys with no storage, lax, exhausted parents and lots o’ stuff is 85.33 ft^2/hr and min for one, 17-year-old with strict, energetic parents, with little stuff and ample storage (on a nice day, etc.) is 0.21 ft^2/hr.

Further mathematical sweetness:

Notice that the speed of mess is like a velocity. By calculating “velocities” for each hour in a single day and summing these velocities, you could discover how many square feet of junk accumulates per day (those willing to get down with calc could do it more accurately). Then, using the total area of the room and the percentage coverage at which point you go batty, you could calculate how often you need to instigate a massive cleaning effort (MCE). There’s lotsa other cool stuff you could do with SOM—any suggestions?

Want a real Halloween nightmare? Imagine filling your child’s too-small bucket in the first three houses and going home with only a small slice of your kid’s potential rake. But if you allow your little monster (or in my case, blue whale with pink and purple barnacles), to carry a big bag, you should be prepared to spend the hours and hours (and hours) needed to fill it. Bad news: there are nightmares on both ends of the bag guesstimation spectrum.

So instead of playing the equivalent of Russian roulette with your child’s Halloween bag size, use the equation below to calculate—with the power of absolute mathematical certainty (wink, wink)—the bag size that’s best for you and yours.

If you’d like the live version, I’m Skyping into Good Day Sacramento on Saturday morning at 6:40am PST to explain this revolutionary scientific breakthrough in person. (I’m sure they’ll post vid online.)